In March 2016, I finished the Hell’s Hills 50-kilometer trail race, with cramps in my calves so painful that less than 200 meters from the finish line, I was worried I would fall and not be allowed to get up and finish. I alternated between little old man jog steps, and mincing little walking steps that would get me mocked by any toddler that could make words. I did finish, and it was the ONLY time in my life I cried after a race. There are more stories from that race, and more lessons from the cramping-hours I’d like to share, but I can’t encapsulate it in three-hundred words. I’ve discovered in the last few weeks of writing that I seem to have reached the limit of what I can write in a one-hour session after work, or after my day is wrapped up, and feel satisfied. For now, at least, it feels like I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of the short-form memory writing. 

My 150th post about being a college DJ was a mad-scramble to post something, after about ninety minutes of writing about a different subject. I really liked where it was going, but I had only scratched the surface when I looked at the time, and realized I wasn’t going to get it to a place I would be comfortable sharing. I added it to a scrap-book of half-written essays that I loved starting, but would have to “finish  later”. 

In May of 2016, I met a running friend for the Paleface Trail Marathon, a “measly” 26 miles, with a longer race completion medal and some-overconfidence. The Texas temperature change in just 6 short weeks was significant, and the dawn thermometer was already close to what it had peaked at in the middle of the March race. After I passed through the half-way point, I could already tell I was flagging, and just past a water station I started feeling woozy. Walking back to the water station for some Gatorade, I made the decision to stop the run. I was pretty sure that if I kept going, there was a chance I was going to hurt myself, and add a lot of stress to a lot of runners and volunteer’s days. I opted to walk off the course under my own power while I still could, before I became a hazard. It was not so much a humbling lesson as a lesson in humility, and I do think there is a subtle difference. 

Each daily post is “titled” with a number that increases by 1/365 (in decimal form), under the pretense that on my 365th post, it would read 1.00000. I don’t want to wait another 215 days to finish the post I started earlier this week. It means too much to me. But honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to write a new short-post every day, then chip away at the deeper stuff. Additionally, and I can’t believe I’m writing this out for everyone to see, and confirm once and for all just how nerdy I am, the daily posts are keeping me from writing and running the D&D campaign I DM with my friends and family. Go ahead and mock me for complaining about my “first world problems”. I do. 

So today I’m walking off the course I set for myself on my birthday. The past 2 days of not writing were some of the most refreshing and creative days I’ve had in a month. The Google-sheet I set up still has a lot of writing prompts on it, and I’d like to meet those deadlines for myself as the weeks go on. Obviously one danger of easing up on yourself is that it gets easier to let even more things slip, so we’ll have to see what future me actually does. Less than a month into this project, Ginny Gaige, asked if I was posting them because I had a terminal illness and this was my way of capturing my memories before my brain went. The answer was no then, and it’s still no. I’m not stopping because anything significant has changed in my life. I’m stopping posting daily because the most significant change is my relationship to posting daily. I’ve jogged around this particular block enough times to know exactly when the wind gusts, and I want to go for longer, more exploratory runs. 

A lot of you have been giving me wonderful feedback from this, and I’m letting down the little imaginary versions of y’all that live in my head. I know the actual y’alls are way less judgemental, though. Thanks for being excellent.

I was a radio DJ in college. WHRW (It’s W east of the Mississippi River and K west of it), was, and still is, the entirely student-operated station for Binghamton University. When I was there the broadcast radius barely covered campus, I don’t know if that’s changed now.

I had to take an FCC test as a radio operator, after apprenticing with another DJ, in this case my friend Tim Lock. If I remember correctly there were different “divisions“In the station: folk, jazz, rock, classical(?) and Tim was a member of the folk division. We mostly play folk and alternative folk, but we could do almost whatever we wanted.  The music library was a holy place. Of course now that all of our fancy smart-machines have infinite Spotify streams, we all have the equivalent on floor to ceiling rooms of vinyl records, but in 1991, it was a treasure trove. No-one in the world thinks my music taste or knowledge are exceptional, and they are right, a library is a library, and that made me feel at home. Popping over to the station between classes, browsing the stacks, and finding a record player and headphones to discover something new was as much a part of my education as many classes. I hope they still have all those records. It was just moving to more and more CDs during my days in the early 90’s. 

Bill Church and I had a show our senior year. It was terrible. It was at 7am or something. We’d rotate: me one week, him the next, then the both of us doing bad morning drive time over 60’s folk. If I still have a tape, I’m glad I no longer have a cassette player. 

The thing I really remember from doing radio was how my voice changed. The first time Tim left me alone for an hour while I was training, I dropped into the classic public radio voice. I don’t know why. No one I’d heard on the radio at Binghamton talked like that, ever. But something in me started with an incredibly quiet crisp voice like I was introducing the classical hits for grandma. Some combination of fear and propriety happened, and it just came out, like when Ross Geller taught with a British accent. Over time, my natural voice came back, as I got less freaked out by the idea that four or seven people might be listening. 

I stared at the box in my hands until my neck got sore. I failed to make eye contact, obsessed with the events on the small rectangle in my grasp. Waiting, patiently, for my enemy to miscalculate and then….a break, and downfield I went.! Each press of the button rewards me with progress towards the goal-line, and a surprisingly satisfying “thuck”. My eyes and my fingers are acting in accord until finally, I hear the tinny, rising notes of the “Touchdown” tune on my Mattel Electronic Football. 

I think this is where hand-held gaming started; at least for me. The internet says it came out in 1977, and it likely was a Christmas Present that year or the next. I played mine into the ground. Actually, since those electronics from the late-seventies were made so sturdily, mine is possibly still out there somewhere playable. But I played it forever. I know I mastered it: I got to the point where I was competing with myself to see if I could break the game’s two-digit score limit, and I’m pretty sure I did. I could make my little, slightly brighter red dash outsmart all the opposing red dashes at will. I learned that since the game screen only represented ten-yards at a time, it made sense to hesitate and stunt a bit downfield if I broke free, so the defenders would slowly meander towards me. That would spread out the gauntlet when my little red symbol appeared for the next ten yards. Of course this lost me time to run up the score at the cost of wasting time dawdling. I could feel myself gaining expertise and confidence, which was a not insignificant thing for a cross-eyed, half-deaf kid. I learned I could master the tactical game, if not the physical one. This is where I learned how to outthink an opponent.

From a design standpoint, the case was genius at work. The simple silk-screen lines and the little plastic stands, which acted as a sun visor, fixed the abstract dance of dashes in a classic football stadium, held in the hand. The stage was set for you (well, me) to tell my story of prowess.  

https://youtu.be/jNKgpAFOsa0

This is the world’s ugliest picture frame, and I’d like to talk about why I love it. The frame’s aesthetic should speak for itself, but if it’s not clear in the picture, it’s made of that cheap-souvenir resin that tourist trap tschotskes  are made from. It’s official name in our house is “the angel-butt frame”. It was given to Michele by Mrs. Halford, the lady in the picture with her, and when my wife opened it, I felt a physical repulsion. This is perhaps one of the greatest mismatches between the material quality and emotional quality of a gift I have ever encountered. 

Joyce Halford was Michele‘s kindergarten teacher, and Michele was in the first class of kids enrolled in the school. Mrs. Halford went on to be the principal of the elementary school, and Michele was the valedictorian of the first graduating class of four kids. Since the tiny school wasn’t accredited, Michele had to test for her GED that summer, just to get into college. A decade later, when Michele graduated medical school, Mrs Halford had her daughter, I think, drive her from San Antonio to Houston to watch Michele graduate. She sought Michele out in the crowded George R Brown convention center afterwards to speak the words of love and pride and support, which she’d been giving for a quarter-century. 

On our drive home, I mocked the angel-but frame to Michele, but marveled at the generosity. This woman had been my wife’s first teacher. She had seen the shy, bookish girl graduate, and become a shy, bookish doctor. I knew we would keep the gift, but I didn’t think I would ever want to display it. It lived in a closet for several years. However the frame, like the Grand Canyon, the ocean, and Mrs. Halford, as you spend more time with them their grandeur becomes apparent.

Her picture doesn’t normally live in the frame; it’s the wrong size. I dug this picture out of a box, and knew I had to share the story and the frame.  The frame now protects pictures of some of our best friends and their then newborn son, now attending college. It has pride of place in our dining room. 

Mrs. Halford died last year. 

When his oldest, Joel, turned thirteen, Craig Duncan organized a rafting trip for him as a kind of coming-of-age celebration. He invited me, along with some of the other male teachers from Chinquapin, to join the crew, and head West. Just a year into living in Texas, New Braunfels felt like a distant jungle destination from Houston, where we all lived, though it’s growth and my proximity to it over the twenty five years since has redrawn my sense of the region completely. I don’t remember what time of year it was, though I recall it being a lovely day of camaraderie among men who were generous with their friendship, at a time when I was still feeling far from home and far from my own competence. Being on a raft was itself a nice boost to my ego. Since I was a relatively experienced river paddler and outdoorsman, at least compared to the rest of the group, I felt comfortable and valuable, not that we needed expertise. As the youngest adult in the crowd I also remember feeling perhaps that I had a little bit of an aura of “cool“ that the rest of the men, all dad‘s, might perhaps not, to the eyes of the teenage Joel. Whether deluded or not, that is the state of mind I embedded in my memory of the weekend.

Everyone else headed back home that Saturday evening, but I stayed and slept the night in my bag in the back of my red Isuzu pick up truck, with it’s tiny square camper shell. I had arranged with the river rental company to procure a kayak to run the stretch of water again solo, a bit of adventure and coming of age of my own. It was an open topped kayak, but as I had never mastered a kayak roll, being able to get out of the boat if it capsized was for the best, since it did. I’ve never met a boat I couldn’t fall out of. Including that one. 

I was the first person on the river that morning, so the chatter of the previous day’s rafting was supplanted by the splash of fish, the flap of bird-wing, the plop of turtle. For a few hours I felt free of navigating the stresses of being a young teacher and young adult, having only to follow the river’s path. 

There was no swelling orchestral music in the background when I picked myself up, after falling within sight of the finish line of my first triathlon. Because it was being run by the “Rock’n’Roll”-branded event company, there almost certainly was music, and it was probably some shitty John Cougar song, but I didn’t hear music. I just heard myself swearing, mostly at the uncoordinated jackass who ran into me at the last sharp turn into the finishing chute. He just barged into me to keep his balance, and kept right on going. When I finished rolling, and the laser beams failed to shoot out of my eyes to incinerate him, I pushed myself off the spongy mat that had softened my fall but scarred my knee, and ran the last fifty yards and across the finish line with the energy I had left.

Exactly a year earlier, I had talked my wife and parents into a trip to Austin, just to watch them compete, mostly to check out how the swimming leg of it worked. I’m a decent swimmer, but I had never tried to swim a half-mile, let alone in an open lake, and frankly the idea scared the crap out of me. The four of us stood on the sidewalk of the Congress Street bridge (closed for the race) and watched waves of men and women in a crayola box of swim caps (to group them by age) crawl from buoy to buoy. Some looked like machines coursing through the water. Others flailed at the water with less competence.  The sight of kayaks spaced out every few yards watching over the swimmers gave me a huge sense of relief, and committed me to being in the splashing mass the following year. 

Even before a person jumps off the dock into the water to begin the swim, a triathlon is a surreal experience. I have literally NEVER been in a place where so many people looked exactly like me. I’ve only done a couple of races, all in Austin, but from my experience, three-quarters of male triathletes are reasonably fit white guys with buzz cut hair. The only way you can tell the thirties guys from the forties guys is by how grey the fuzz at their temples is. A few of us didn’t have tribal-band tattoos. The next year I competed, my parents came down to watch, and my mom and dad decided they’d just cheer for everyone, in the statistical likelihood that one of them had to be me. 

So I stood in a crowd of hundreds of other Kevins, Brads, Chads, Thads, Brents and Brians until it was our turn to, one by one, jump into the water and swim away, like baby turtles, to face the dangers of the open water, mainly bumping into other swimmers not paying attention. Some races start with entire groups all at once, and I am glad not to have been in one yet, as I do not enjoy being kicked in the face. Swimming out a hundred yards from shore is an instantly sobering experience, and was a real test of nerve for me. Even in my prep year, I’d only been able to swim in a local river, which wasn’t much wider than an olympic size pool. I had to work hard to get my adrenaline and breath under control, and start the slow, steady stroke I had practiced all those early mornings at the local pool. One trick I’ve always told myself to counter the fear of big open water, is that there is no difference between seven foot deep and seventy foot deep water: they’re  both over my head. So as the bottom of the lake dropped away, I focused on the seven feet below me, and “just kept swimming.” 

There are entire courses you can take to learn the art of triathlon transitioning, so as to not lose precious time. I watched a couple YouTube videos and tried to stay out of that rabbit hole, rationalizing that if I got to transition, I hadn’t drowned, and that was a victory in itself. Honestly, it’s not that hard to dry your feet off on a little towel and strap your helmet on. I suppose an elite performer pushing her metabolism to the edge might save a second by having shoes clipped to their bike pedals already, but once you have to remember to leave your bifocals in your helmet, the word elite loses all meaning.

There are no interesting stories about the cycling section of a triathlon. Everyone gets on the bike they overpaid for, because it’s easier to pay for a lighter bike than lose the weight and train harder, and sets off at a pace they’ve pre planned based upon hours of previous riding. All triathletes are nerds with a little computer/speedometer on the bar that they just stare at like a bunch of WhatsApping teens, only sweatier and breathing heavier, possibly. It depends upon how a person uses WhatsApp, I suppose. So depending upon the length of the course, you get off the bike thirty to sixty minutes later, with swollen thighs, change your shoes, and try to remember how to move without wheels. Watching the first fifty yards outside of the bike-run transition is Benny Hill funny. Everyone looks like they should be able to run, but they’re still trying to rewire from the trance the bike put them into. Also your legs are really tired. People spend a lot of money on specialty-built triathlon bikes with the seat and pedals positioned to preserve their running muscles. I don’t know if they work. I don’t have one of those. Everyone waddles like a duck for fifty meters. 

Between the end of the duck-running zone and the being pushed over by a youngster zone, I had three-thousand meters of what I remember as the “it’s too hot and I’m tired” zone. As I’ve mentioned before, I run like a metronome. I can literally set my legs to a beats per minute number and just go. I don’t like to listen to music when I run, because in my brain, every run is a reenactment of the movie Apollo 13. My body is a capsule moving through a hostile environment, and I’m just checking from gauge to gauge to see what’s going to try to kill me next. Calf tightness, nominal; heart rate, yellow alert; low-back posture, slouchy – tighten it up for the curve; knee creak, holding at level-six for now. Airline pilots trying to ditch in the Hudson have fewer checklists than I do during a three mile run. 

One way to tell what races are owned and organized by runners versus non-competitors is what order people give you things after you cross a finish line. If the order is drink, banana, medal, the hosts have actually finished races; If it’s medal, drink, banana, they haven’t. Who the FUCK wants to be approached face to face by a stranger who hangs extra weight around their neck? Even Han and Luke got to clean up and eat a damn banana first. Afterwards, I wandered around the grassy plaza, eating my medal, with my banana hanging around my neck, until it was time to go get my bike and head home.

Carrying the bike to the top floor of the parking garage made me wish I’d paid the money for the lighter bike.

There were two memorable Italian restaurants In Binghamton while I was in college. Pino’s was in Binghamton itself. It was an institution, with a long history. It was the preferred place for “fancy” college dates, and packed on parents weekends, or anytime your folks would come visit. Not super fancy, but a nice enough converted house with winding rooms full of small tables. I looked it up, and like a lot of family restaurants, when the founder, Giuseppe (Pino) got old, it fell apart in a squabble between the next generation. The most lasting memory I have is burning my mouth on one of my first bites there. It soured me a bit. 

I preferred Pronto(‘s?), down the road a few miles in Conklin. Conklin was a couple of winding curves down the Susquehanna River, so only 15-20 minutes by car, but would have been a day away in a previous century. The dad of a dorm mate freshman year worked for the railroad, and swore he knew all the hidden gems in the area, and damn if he wasn’t right! He came to visit and took a couple of us around the mountain for dinner. Pronto was more of a Italian grocery in the front, tables in the back kind of place. It had the most delicious garlic knots I’ve ever eaten, and the standard against which all others have been judged. I can still taste the first bite of bread, and feel the slight burn on my fingertips, because I never waited when the basket reached the table. 

I have no idea how old this plaid shirt is. I have no memory of when this shirt entered my wardrobe. It’s unlikely that I’ve always had it; that it was the fabric my parents swaddled me in before they sent me in the probe from Kevton to Earth. Improbable, but not not impossible. I’ve always had it, with an asterisk on always. It’s possible this particular plaid shirt is a near-as-I-could-come replacement for an older plaid shirt I had in high school. However it’s also possible that this is the actual shirt I got in high school, since it’s got an American Eagle label, and I certainly haven’t been in an American Eagle, if they still exist, since the second millennium ended. So it’s at least twenty years old, and it could be closer to 35. 

It’s a comfort shirt. It comes out this time of year when it starts to get cold enough around the house to need “another layer.” It probably gets washed once a year, but I wouldn’t count on it. I only wear it for a few minutes at a time, when I step outside to get the mail, or similar errand. Mostly it just hangs there, on that hook in Autumn and Winter, or deeper in the closet for the warmer months. It’s basically a blanky, or a wooby, or a towely, or whatever you called your security item as a child. 

An amazing thing is that as I snapped this picture, I noticed all the other objects in frame that also keep me feeling safe and warm and comforted:

1. The green quilted pillow was made for me by Marsha Nagorsky, and given as a Christmas present more than twenty years ago. She gave a similar one to Jenn Goetz (purple) and Michele (black & white), the one time we were all in one place for a holiday visit. It’s perfect for hugging to my chest, much like Marsha.
2. The pillow is sitting on one of the world’s ugliest ottomans, which has a matching chair, called the “chair of many colors”. My parents footed the bill for the chair/ottoman combo as a 30th birthday present, when Michele and I bought couches to furnish our married living space. The chair is my video gaming chair upon which I sit weekly to play online with Matt, Nate, Jarrett. The ottoman moved into my bedroom when our cat got spayed and needed to spend the night close by. It never left, and if you look at the leg, you can see it’s a favorite scratching post, second only to the chair, which is gradually being turned back into yarn.
3. There are two frames on the wall, which you can barely see in the picture. The larger is a poster-print of a waterfall my wife and I hiked to on our honeymoon in Oregon. Coincidentally, it’s name is Oneonta Falls, named after a town not far from where I attended college. The second frame holds a collage/pinboard of pictures, cards and the program from our wedding. My mom put it together for us.

I am overwhelmed with the flood of warm, safe, loving memories that this one small slice of my world provides tonight, when so very many people have so much fear, and so little comfort and safety in this world. 

The last few months I worked at the VA in Temple, I worked for a pulmonologist. I spent some mornings helping him put cameras down people’s throats into their lungs to snip out bits of tissue (it was always cancer), and most of the day evaluating people with sleep problems to see if they needed CPAP machines. CPAP stands for constant positive airway pressure. A CPAP machine is basically a vacuum cleaner on reverse that blows a “gentle” amount of air into your nose and mouth to keep your airway open while you sleep. If you snore really badly and are tired all the time, ask your healthcare provider.

Two afternoons a week a ran the COPD clinic, where I was the sole judge of whether old men got provided with oxygen tanks. The problem is that everyone feels better with oxygen, even you and I would. Since oxygen and supplies are expensive, and a little hazardous, the government was picky about who got it. Mostly, it gave oxygen to people who could walk, but got short of breath real fast, in the hopes that it gave mobile people more ability to get around and care for themselves, and out of the VA. So after chatting with them, and an exam, I would hook them up to an oxygen sensor, and we would go for a stroll around the office hallway square. I’d watch their oxygen level for drops as we walked. If it went low enough, they qualified for oxygen; if it didn’t, they got nothing. 

Tonight, I feel like those old smokers: just taking one tired step after another, losing steam. There’s no particular reason. Work isn’t any better or worse than usual. Hell, I just had a long weekend vacation, where I slept and biked, and hiked, and ran, and even got to see my parents for the first time in six months. Of course, the world’s on fire (is that still literally true in California? Is it over, or did the news just move on to the political nightmare we’re all in?), but that’s both not new. Knock on wood, we’re all healthy here, how’re you? 

So let me look for that little spurt of oxygen to keep on steppin’… Where is it tonight? 

• It’s in the taste of the Chips-ahoy cookies Michele bought for our weekend getaway snacks. They taste like childhood dipped in milk.
• It’s in the fact that my cat, who I unwittingly raised like a dog, will sit still while I put an LED lighted collar around her before I take her outside for a few minutes every night, but who even now, is mewling plaintively at my elbow to go back outside again.
• It’s in the box of old pictures behind me, filled with more memories.

Some boozy malcontent, not satisfied with the simple pleasure of drunkenly plunging into Grafton Lake from the rocks, has left a green-glass land mine to cut into my tender foot and my fun.

The joke’s on him though, because unlike me, the girl who is taking pity on me and walking me back to my mother, has gone through puberty.

Her not-yet sunburned skin fills her bikini in a way I have only seen on posters, and she lets me lean against her to take some weight off my bleeding flesh.